Huh: Quirks and Perks

Forget figures of speech. Avoid them all. Speak cleanly, and commit no rhetorical crimes. What remains is aschematiston.

But that, too, is a vice.

Aschematiston comes from the Greek, meaning without form or figure, and technically it designates not only plain-speaking but also the inappropriate use of figurative speech.

In Trying to Be Cute, I discuss how one way to think about vices (the coin model), considers licit rhetoric to lie between the extremes: the ordinary and any of the various ornamented styles. Most of us know overwrought when we see it, but aschematiston is harder to spot. In particular, sometimes it’s not clear whether a literal interpretation is called for, or whether there’s a hidden metaphorical dimension after all. I termed this phenomenon the metaphorical itch. I often encounter it in surrealist literature, but it’s also present in contextually ambiguous situations.

The last batch of my Nature Magazineheadlines falls into this category. See what you think.

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2 responses

I like the use of the word ‘overwrought’ . I might post a story one day – with photographs – of a blacksmith making wrought iron articles. When he hammers the iron on the anvil it can be ‘wrought’ into useful and beautiful shapes. But hammered too hard or excessively it become brittle, thin and fragile. Don’t hit the iron too hard with the hammer or you might hurt your hand,

Yes, most things that get hammered, stretched, twisted a bit far end up useless or destroyed … however, even though overwrought has the negative over- connotation, it still sometimes makes me think of filagree jewellery, lace, or paper cut outs, which are thoroughly impractical but have aesthetic value in certain situations …

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